The Murderous Mary

Mary (c. 1894–September 13, 1916), also known as "Murderous Mary", was a five-ton Asian elephant who performed in the Sparks World Famous Shows circus.

 After killing a keeper on his second day at work, in Kingsport, Tennessee, in 1916, she was hanged in nearby Erwin.

The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial derrick between four o'clock and five o'clock that afternoon.

The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip as dozens of children fled in terror. 

The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks.

 A veterinarian examined Mary after the hanging and determined that she had a severely infected tooth in the precise spot where Red Eldridge had prodded her. 

The authenticity of a widely distributed (and heavily retouched) photo of her death was disputed years later by Argosy magazine.

Bizarre true story of the 1916 hanging of Murderous Mary, a circus elephant from Sparks World Famous Shows, in a Tennessee mountain town.

WARNING: This story describes the killing of a circus elephant.  It may be too disturbing for some readers.  But we present the story in its entirety so we may learn lessons from the past.

Before the days when television and the internet beamed countless entertainment options into even the most remote American homes, the traveling circus was small town America’s ticket to worlds of magic and wonder. Each year, young and old alike excitedly filled the streets to watch a parade of festively colored wagons, clowns, performers and exotic animals roll into town. As railroad systems spread throughout America, circuses of all sizes fought for the hard earned dollars of American families.

But when Sparks World Famous Shows, a mid-sized, 15-rail car circus, rolled into the mountain community of Erwin, Tennessee on September 13, 1916, they promised a bizarre spectacle no circus had offered before. After the matinee performance, they promised Erwin’s citizens a free, public hanging of who was then the most notorious killer in Tennessee: “Murderous Mary.”

Mary was a circus elephant.

What you are about to read is a true story. Some events leading up to the hanging of Murderous Mary the elephant, aka Big Mary, have been clouded over time by faulty memories, folklore and media exaggerations. Some of Erwin’s citizens avoid discussing the incident to this day.

But there is little doubt the hanging of Mary the elephant took place in the Erwin rail yards on September 13, 1916. An event that would forever brand this little known community as the “town that hung the elephant.”

Big Mary the Elephant

Without a doubt, the star of Sparks World Famous Shows was Big Mary, a giant Asian elephant. Sparks advertised Big Mary on its posters as “The Largest Living Land Animal on Earth.” They claimed she weighed over 5 tons and stood “3 inches taller than Jumbo,” the star elephant of Barnum and Bailey Circus. Crowds roared with delight as Mary performed tricks like standing on her head, playing musical instruments and pitching a baseball. 

But it was her size that awed many people from rural communities. They had never seen an animal this large or exotic. Big Mary was valued anywhere from $8,000 to $20,000 (a huge amount at the time).

But Mary was more than a performing elephant to Charlie Sparks. His father had purchased Mary in 1898 when she was four years old. She had been the family pet ever since. After Charlie married Addie Mitchell, the circus’s head cook and animal doctor, Big Mary, in essence, became the child this couple never had. Charlie firmly instructed his employees to be kind, gentle and respectful to all his animals, especially his beloved elephant Mary.

Despite the show’s success, it lagged behind its major competitor in the South, John Robinson’s Four Ring Circus and Menagerie. John Robinson’s show boasted 42 railroad cars and larger numbers of performers and animals. Competition between the two circuses and other traveling shows became so fierce, each resorted to unique tactics to separate itself from the others.

Red Eldridge, The Victim

Being a family-owned circus, Sparks World Famous Shows advertised itself as a “100% Sunday School Circus,” meaning it was fair and honest with the public, and allowed no shortchanging of customers. To avoid tipping off rival shows, Charlie Sparks kept his routes a secret, and rarely advertised in circus trade papers. Mere days before his show arrived in town, his scouts would plaster the area with colorful posters.

On the morning of September 11, 1916, before Sparks Circus arrived in the small mining community of St. Paul, Virginia, a local hotel worker named Walter “Red” Eldridge spotted one of these posters.

He was about to change the life of Charlie Sparks and his circus forever.

To this day, historians know little about Red Eldridge. At the time, Eldridge was between 23 and 38 years of age and worked at the Riverside Hotel in St. Paul.  When Sparks Circus arrived, Eldridge approached head elephant trainer Paul Jacoby for a job. Despite Eldridge’s inexperience, Jacoby hired him as an under keeper of the elephants. 

Eldridge’s job responsibilities included watering the elephants and preparing them for parades and shows. For the next few days, Eldridge followed Sparks Circus’s “gentling care” philosophy when it came to the animals.

When the show ended, Eldridge quit his hotel job and traveled south with Sparks Circus to their next stop in Kingsport, Tennessee. Kingsport then looked like a town out of the Wild West.  The recently completed Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railroad (known simply as the “Clinchfield”) linked Kingsport with the coal fields to the north, turning it into an industrial boom town. Workers streamed into Kingsport, with many living in temporary tent shelters in the center of town. The streets were muddy and clogged with wagons, wild animals and crowds.

“Murderous” Mary

On September 12, Kingsport was putting on its first county fair, and Sparks World Famous Shows was going to be a part of it. Crowds from the surrounding hills came into town, swelling Kingsport’s already overcrowded streets. Sometime during the day, crowds lined the roadsides to watch Big Mary and her fellow elephants – Queen, Topsy, and the two babies, Ollie and Mutt – march through town, trunk to tail.

Historians debate what happened next. But the most popular story is that the elephants were being led to a watering ditch between shows. Eldridge guided Mary with a bull hook – a stick with a hook on its end. Sparks Circus trained Eldridge to nudge her gently and not provoke her.

According to this telling, sometime during the procession, Mary stopped. Several eyewitnesses claimed she spotted a piece of watermelon on the ground, reaching down to grab it with her trunk. Eldridge forgot his training and roughly prodded her with the stick (some believe at the site of Mary’s sore tooth). Enraged, Big Mary grabbed Eldridge with her trunk, lifted him in the air, and flung him against what some claim was a drink stand. Then, according to eyewitness accounts, she stomped over and, with her massive foot, crushed Eldridge’s head.

The crowds screamed and ran for their lives. Some say a local blacksmith fired shots at Mary, but the bullets bounced off her thick hide. Hearing the screams, Charlie Sparks rushed over and put his arm around Mary’s trunk, calming her down. He then saw the mangled body of Red Eldridge, the magnitude of Big Mary’s actions suddenly apparent.

But what was even more frightening was the chant coming from the crowd. Anger had burned away the fear in many of the onlookers. Now their voices rang out in unison: “Kill the elephant!”

Charlie Sparks’s Heartbreaking Decision

Kingsport officials quickly “arrested” Mary the elephant and staked her outside the county jail, where more onlookers gathered around her. Meanwhile, Charlie Sparks and his staff had a gut-wrenching decision to make concerning Mary’s fate.

In those days, “rogue” elephants like Big Mary who injured or killed someone could quietly have their names changed and sold to another circus. But the story of Eldridge’s gruesome death spread like wildfire throughout northeastern Tennessee. The newspapers already nicknamed the elephant “Murderous Mary,” and claimed she had killed before. The mayor of nearby Johnson City, the circus’s next stop, banned Sparks World Famous Shows from setting foot in the city as long as Murderous Mary was with them.  More cities were almost certainly to follow. What’s worse, rumors spread of a lynch mob on its way to Kingsport to kill Mary – armed with an old Civil War cannon.

Charlie was a smart businessman.  He knew if he didn’t satisfy the public’s desire for swift justice, his show would be financially ruined. But his final decision ultimately came down to his concern for public safety. “A human’s life is something I don’t want charged against me,” he later claimed in a 1924 interview. “If people in the business get hurt, that’s our lookout. But with an outsider – that’s different.”

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